7 hours ago
23
Since June, an app has allowed survivors, who are overwhelmingly women, to see exactly where their stalker is
On a large screen in a control centre in eastern Seoul, a dot representing a man closes in on a woman. The dot changes direction, and the distance reading between them falls from 845 metres to 792.
On the woman’s phone, the same map is loading. A probation officer rings her: the stalker is approaching, don’t panic, officers have been dispatched. The man is a stand-in and the scenario is staged, but the system is real.
Since late June, a stalking survivor in South Korea can open an app and watch a tagged perpetrator move in real time once they come within a 2km radius. If they come within a kilometre, an alert is passed to police and probation authorities, who call the victim. Previously, survivors received only a text message stating a distance, with no indication of location. About 400 people are now enrolled in the new scheme.
“Waiting with no idea what’s happening is deeply distressing,” says Yoon Hyun-bong, who directs the control centre. “A distance alone doesn’t tell you which direction he’s coming from, but seeing it on a map, you know where to hide.”
Stalking cases are on the rise in South Korea. Reports have tripled in the four years since a dedicated stalking law was introduced in 2021, reaching 44,687 in 2025. Around 80% of stalking victims are women. In South Korea, police can apply to the courts to make a suspected stalker wear an ankle tag that tracks them.
The introduction of the app follows a string of stalking killings that shocked the country. In March, prosecutors allege a man wearing an ankle tag blocked his former partner’s car as she left work in Namyangju, north-east of Seoul, broke the window with a drill and stabbed her. A court had already barred him from approaching her after she reported him for stalking. He is on trial for murder, which he denies, claiming diminished responsibility.
The justice ministry, which runs the tagging system, could see where he was at all times, but the police handling her stalking case did not know he was being tracked.
19,000 alerts a day
Two control centres, in Seoul and Daejeon, handle around 19,000 alerts a day between them, covering the more than 5,000 people who are under electronic monitoring for offences ranging from sexual violence to murder. Most are filtered out by staff at the centres but about 300 a day are serious enough to send out a probation officer.
In Seoul, probation officers sit calmly at three banks of screens showing a live list of danger and caution alerts, and beside each, the subject’s description and even the battery level of their tag.
Each officer handles more than 20 monitored people, a figure the ministry says it is trying to halve as the numbers grow.
“We’d have liked to suspend monitoring while you were here, but we can’t stop for a minute, not for a second,” an official says.
Opinions about the new app, which is still in its early days and on a limited scale, are mixed. Anna*, a woman who fled a violent former partner, says knowing where he was would have made a difference. She spent two weeks moving between state-run shelters for survivors of domestic violence before being given a panic-button watch which alerts police and sends officers her location. The app was not available at the time for her, but she says she would have welcomed it.
“Even with the watch on, it still never gave me the peace of mind, because I didn’t know where he was at any time,” she said. “What if I took it off for a shower, and that just happened to be the time he broke into my house?”
Sujeong Kim, the director of the women’s human rights counselling centre at the Korea Women’s Hotline says knowing a perpetrator’s whereabouts can be more helpful than not knowing. But she questions whether giving survivors that information also risks shifting responsibility for their safety on to them.
“If the authorities did their job properly, who would want to check it themselves?” she says, adding that victims may end up checking wherever they go to see whether the perpetrator has entered the radius, adding to the psychological burden of living with the threat and feeling they must be ready to flee.
Then there is the issue of tagging. The app works only if a court has ordered tagging, and in stalking cases that is rarely sought. Police apprehended 29,404 people on stalking charges across 2024 and 2025. Over the same period they made 1,187 applications to tag suspects, of which courts only granted 427. Whether the new app changes how often tagging is sought or granted is not yet clear.
South Korea’s police agency said they apply for a tag where there is a risk of reoffending, and that in practice they escalate measures to separate a perpetrator from a victim in stages, according to the risk and the seriousness of the case.
Kang Shin-won, who heads the justice ministry’s electronic monitoring division, says the tag serves as a minimum safety measure, because not every suspect can realistically be removed from society.
Yoon Hyun-bong, who directs the Seoul centre, says that having something concrete to watch is less distressing than waiting blind, and an improvement on the distance figure that was previously given via text.
For Kim, none of this addresses the wider issue.
“The cause of this problem, and the reason it doesn’t get solved, is gender discrimination”, she says. “Treating it as unimportant, as a private matter, as something the victim can sort out on her own, that all comes from gender discrimination, too.”
*Name has been changed.
